Someday, Ellie will be doing all our housework!
(And for the record, it was her idea for her to scrub the sink – not mine.)
(And yes, this means I actually managed to do some house work, during the week, without another adult around to hold Mark. So things are looking up!)
He’s legitimately smiling all the time now! (This is not just a premature claim.) We haven’t managed to catch him in a full blown smile yet but here’s a few almost-smiles!
This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short. If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on. I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.
And we’re back! It was a nice three-month break, in which I was a little busy (just having a baby, no big deal) and now we’re trying to get back to normal around here!
I thought I had wrapped up the “Cleaning” portion of this series but I recently realized that I hadn’t talked about washing dishes or laundry. For almost all the other cleaning, we just use baking soda and vinegar. Those don’t work for dishes and laundry though so in those two categories, we do buy our cleaning products.
For hand washing dishes, we buy 7th Generation Free and Clear dish soap. For our dishwasher, we use 7th Generation Automatic Dishwasher Powder. Neither of those are perfect in their ingredient lists but they’re at least fragrance free and significantly better for the environment than standard soap and detergent.
For laundry, we use Country Save laundry detergent and Bac Out stain remover. We don’t use fabric softener/dryer sheets. Fabric softener/dryer sheets are particularly bad offenders when it comes to obnoxious chemicals. It’s also usually humid enough here that we don’t have an issue with static often enough for it to bother me.
All of these products are more expensive than buying standard equivalents from the store. However, we’re willing to pay more to keep all those crazy toxic chemicals out of our house. I also use half the recommended amount of laundry detergent (basically the HE amount in our regular washing machine). Our clothes still get clean and the box lasts twice as long! We also spend very little on any other cleaning supplies.
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On my list of “projects to do eventually”: make felted wool dryer balls. They are supposed to help your dryer work more efficiently as well as eliminate static and wrinkles. You can buy them too but they’re supposed to be really easy and cheap to make.
More about why you probably don’t want to use fabric softener or dryer sheets.
More about the toxic ingredients in standard laundry detergent. Also, I’ve thought about making my own laundry detergent but have put that in the “I don’t feel like doing it right now” category. Country Save works for us and our cloth diapers and that’s good enough for now.
For those in the Baltimore area, we buy our Country Save at Soft and Cozy Baby. Target and Giant both carry 7th Generation dish soap. Currently, the only place I can find our dishwasher powder is Whole Foods (hence our Valentine’s Day visit to Whole Foods). It was a sad day for me when Target stopped carrying it. My guess is that MOM’s might carry it also but I haven’t checked there (I’ve never actually been there).
Thanks to a friend of ours, we recently got a fun book about “Winter Friends“. Because of that book, the other day Ellie was drawing chickadees, which she calls “Chickadee-dee”, because I told her that’s what they say (plus another “dee”). Anyway, isn’t this an impressive little bird?
And don’t you just love the added touch of a little slobber? 🙂
While we’re at it, here’s more art, which I’m showing you as much for the silly faces as for the art itself. I think one of them is a “feesh” although I don’t remember which one.
And finally, just so you all have to endure the crazy colors like I did the other day, here’s her whole outfit (chosen by her, obviously [I hope])- electric blue pants, red and black dress, neon green with pink polka dots shirt underneath. This is when I start chanting, “Pick your battles, pick your battles,” and then tell myself, “At least she’s clothed.”
(especially when it comes to the awesome clothing combinations he’ll get to make.)
for the first time without any help!
Wait!! Where did she go?
Also, Ellie wanted to show you her teeth.
This project was so quick and easy, it’s probably not blog-worthy. But, in the interest of keeping track of everything I’ve sewn, here’s a drawstring bag to get Ellie’s bath toys off of the bathroom floor, made from very lightweight cotton gauze fabric (from my stash), solving an annoying problem without spending a cent!
Currently, we’re hanging it behind our hand towel until I get a hook to put on the wall.
I like how the yellow drawstring pulls in the yellow from our curtain. If we ever repaint our bathroom, I think I’d like it to be yellow!
Although Mark has only been to England in utero, he is still happy to be cheering on his cousins’ adopted country!
Is it weird that I feel more comfortable posting a picture of my child in a shirt featuring another country than in a Ravens shirt?
Bonus: Here’s Ellie in the same shirt.
Mark is very lucky to be the recipient of lots of great clothes from his cousins. We decided to bust out some cute ones for his first trip to church.
Don’t you just love that sweater vest? 🙂
Ellie wanted in on the photo taking action too.
Yes, Ellie’s baby is still bald. I just can’t make myself get excited about making her doll hair. One of these days, I suppose I should because Ellie herself is finally growing hair!
All those people exclaiming about how cute he was wore him out! 🙂
Thanks for sharing your clothes with us, Alex and Luke!
Our laundry room is in our basement and that’s where we used to keep our stain remover. It made sense to me to keep the stain remover where I washed clothes. Looking for and spraying stains was my least favorite part of doing laundry. I inevitably missed stains and they inevitably didn’t always come out, partly because they’d been sitting so long. I especially hated dealing with poopie diaper blowouts once Ellie came along. The stains never seemed to come out after the first washing. I always knew I should just go down to the basement to spray the stains as they happened but never seemed to find the time or motivation to do it until laundry day.
Fast forward to Mark and his stained laundry: A couple weeks ago it occurred to me that I could keep the stain remover under our kitchen sink and just spray the stains as they occurred! Brilliant! Generally right away, or at least the same day, I spray all the dirty laundry (rinsing out first if necessary) and then throw it in the pail that we keep our cloth wipes and diapers in until it’s time to wash a load of laundry. I haven’t had a single problem with stained baby clothes since.
Why didn’t I think of this before? I just made it easy on myself to do the thing that I knew I should do but somehow couldn’t make myself do. In the self-improvement-blog world, I think this is referred to as a “life hack” – something that makes a task in your life easier, more streamlined, and more productive. That’s also why we hide our paper towels in the linen closet – it’s a reverse life-hack, designed to make it harder on us to use paper towels rather than our dish clothes.
So that’s my brilliant idea for you all – store your stain remover where it’s easily accessible to be used every time a stain occurs.
I’d love to hear any life-hacks that have made your life easier!
Now, if only I can figure out a life-hack to get me doing those abdominal crunches for getting my abs back in shape after growing two babies…
Salmon and Souvlaki 